Chinese researchers say a stressful job may kill you, especially if you’re a woman
Study shows that certain kinds of “high-strain” occupations can significantly increase the risk of suffering a stroke.
If you suspect your stressful job is killing you, a new study says you may be right – especially if you’re a woman.
After analysing data on nearly 140,000 workers from three continents, researchers found that those with “high-strain” jobs were 22 per cent more likely than their peers to suffer a stroke. The risk was particularly acute for women, who were 33 per cent more likely to have a stroke if their jobs fell into this most stressful category.
The findings, published on Wednesday in the journal Neurology, combine results from six previous studies that examined the relationship between work stress and stroke risk. Each of the studies included a baseline assessment of people’s job strain, then tracked their health for 3.4 years to 16.7 years. The workers ranged in age from 18 to 75.
Many of the workers had demanding jobs, but not all of those jobs were considered stressful. The researchers, from Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, China, used a well-established method to categorise jobs into four categories.
To do this, they considered whether a job involved a high degree of “psychological job demand”.
That’s a measure of the mental load required to carry out tasks, the amount of management and coordination required to finish those tasks and the time pressure imposed by deadlines, among other things. The researchers also considered how much latitude workers had in deciding how to carry out their assignments, a factor known as “job control”.
